Desktop publishing applications allowing a user to create electronic documents on the user's personal computer are widely known and established. A copy of the desktop publishing application is typically installed on the user's computer system and stored in the user's computer memory until activated for use by the user. Desktop publishing products of this type must be licensed and paid for prior to or at the time that the product is installed.
Many people or businesses that occasionally have a need to create custom products, such as business cards, postcards, brochures and the like, have historically been required to either purchase, install and learn to operate a desktop publishing application, which they may need only infrequently, or go to the trouble and expense of identifying, visiting and trying to convey their requirements and desires to a print shop employee or graphic designer.
In recent years, another option has become available for the large number of people whose custom document needs have not been well or economically served by the other avenues that had been available. Among the many new businesses that are taking advantage of the capabilities of the Web and modern Web browsers are service providers that provide document design services for users desiring to create customized electronic documents from the user's computer at whatever time and place is convenient to the user. These service providers typically provide their customers with the ability to access the service provider's web site, download product templates and a product design program, create a customized markup language document in the browser of the user's computer system, and upload the document to the printing service provider's server. After the document has been designed by the user, Web-based service providers also typically allow the user to place an order for the production and delivery to the user's home or business of quantities of high quality, printed documents of the type that the user is not capable of producing with the printer systems typically connected to most personal computer systems.
One network-based product design system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,247,011 entitled “Computerized Prepress”. The patent discloses a document-authoring tool that is downloaded from a server and runs in the client browser. The tool allows the user to create a markup language version of a product intended for uploading to the server for subsequent printing. Another system is disclosed in co-pending and co-owned U.S. application Ser. No. 09/557,571 entitled “Managing Print Jobs”, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The system discloses a downloadable editing tool that allows a customer to create and edit WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) markup language documents in the customer's browser. The system makes a number of pre-designed product templates available for customer viewing, downloading, and customizing. The customer can upload the electronic document to a server and place an order for production of the printed products.
Web-based service providers display pre-designed document templates that can be individually selected and downloaded by a user to assist the user in creating a document in the user's browser. The service provider typically has prepared a number of different templates to offer the user a range of choices. The user can review the available templates and select one that contains a combination of design features that appeal to the user. The selected template is downloaded to the user's computer system along with downloaded software tools that can be employed by the user to create a personalized electronic document.
Despite the popularity and substantial use of the Web, certain document editing abilities have not been successfully implemented. After a user has selected a desired template, the document editing by the user is generally limited to positioning textboxes, entering and modifying text in a textbox, and uploading and positioning of the user's images. If the product design templates offered by the service provider are not exactly what the user is looking for, the limited ability to customize may cause the user to go elsewhere or be less than fully satisfied by having to settle for a product design that doesn't quite capture the user's vision. For some potential customers, this has limited the desirability of performing document creation on the Web. There is therefore a need for a system and method to provide users of Web-based document creation systems with enhanced and more powerful customizations tools and techniques.
Even in the more hospitable and controllable operating environment experienced by traditional desktop publishing products, some document editing capabilities have not been realized. Some traditional desktop publishing products have employed the idea of dividing the structure of the document into separate component parts, typically identified as the document layout and the document design, where the layout relates generally to the location and size of the areas of the document devoted to text and the design relates to other elements, such as the images, color scheme, borders, background effects, and the specific font family and font attributes. This prior art layout/design approach to involves the changing of the location of document text without making a corresponding or compensating change in the position of document images or other design features. This can result in unsatisfactory results with text overlapping with design elements in a manner that interferes with readability or is otherwise undesirable.
Further, while some desktop publishing products allow a document layout, design, color scheme and font scheme to be separately selected and controlled, the user is typically forced to make the selection decision based on a set of small generic images. Because the images are completely generic, the user is faced with the problem of surveying the generic images and trying to visualize how the user's document might look. The user may be reduced to repetitively asking to view a display of the generic image options, selecting one of the images, viewing the resultant impact on the document, asking again to see the display of the generic image options, selecting another image, viewing the impact, and so forth until the user ultimately hits upon a result that is satisfactory. Therefore, there is a further need for a more efficient and user-friendly system and method for allowing a user to consider and select among customization choices for the user's document.